Friday, March 8, 2013

Invisible Victims of PTSD

Thank you Alex Kotlowitz, author, neighbor, and Northwestern
University’s Writer in Residence, for insisting in your New York Times article
(The Price of Public Violence, 2/23/2013) that we expand the conversation about children
and murder.

Thank you for insisting that in
addition to mourning the victims, in addition to sending our deepest regrets to
the families of the children, in addition to all our attempts to console by
smothering schools with cards and teddy bears, that we speak about the less
visible victims.

Kotlowitz reminds us that when “Hadiya Peddleton,
the fifteen year old public school student and band majorette, who just a week
earlier had preformed at president Obama’s inauguration, was killed on Jan. 29,
she was standing under an awning in the park with a dozen friends.” Her
treasured friends huddled under the awning on Jan. 29, and that day their world
was also changed forever.

The witnesses, the ones who were missed
by the bullet, the ones who were spared, the ones who watched Hadiya Peddleton,
all the Hadiya Pendeltons in other neighborhoods. The friends and family
members of fourteen year old Dajae Coleman of Evanston, the children of Sandy
Hook Elementary, all of them were witnesses and they are haunted by trauma. Kotlowitz
reminds us that their sense of future is altered by what they experienced.

In 1994 the DSM-IV (the diagnostic
manual) added one word to the criteria for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder from
the previous edition. The word was witness.
It stated that one criteria for PTSD was that “the person has
experienced,witnessed, or been
confronted with an event or events that involve actual or threatened death or
serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of oneself or others.”

The children and families, who walk
the streets where the murder of youth is frighteningly commonplace or for those
who sleep in nicer bedrooms and once imagined it could never happen here, they may
all be the hidden victims of PTSD.

And thank you Alex Kotlowitz for also
paying homage in your article in the New York Times to the impact on other
witnesses, those of us on the front lines. The social workers, the child
advocates, the schoolteachers, the first responders whose souls and bodies are
also infected. We call it secondary trauma, vicarious trauma; we call it
heartbreak.

The witnesses multiply and so too do those who suffer from PTSD, this
has become a hidden public health crisis.

Let us also remember that the
solution may reside in the witnesses. Those who refuse to turn away; those who
refuse to think it is somebody else’s problem, the enlightened witness: communities
that refuse to be indifferent, who are committed to sustain their outrage when
a child, anyone’s child, is murdered and those who are determined to seek solutions
even when it would be easier to turn away.